Lisa Damiano knows the importance of a good education. As a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Stamford's Cloonan Middle School, she said she started thinking about her daughter's school years shortly after learning she was pregnant.

Damiano lived in Norwalk before her daughter, Kayla, was born, and packed up to move to Stamford shortly after so her daughter could attend daycare near the school where Damiano works. But now that Kayla is 5 and it's time for her to sit behind a desk of her own, Damiano is moving again.

"When my daughter was born, I owned a home in Norwalk, and I said, `We have to plan on, in the next five years, thinking about what we're going to do in the long run,' " she said Thursday. "I've been in Stamford ever since. I teach in Stamford, I grew up in Stamford, I believe in Stamford. But when it came time to enroll her in kindergarten, I realized the disparities between towns are glaring."

So she and Kayla are moving to Darien.

"You have different funding for different districts. Darien has different home values and taxes are different than they are in Stamford," said Damiano. "I started my career in Darien a long time ago. Just look at their class sizes. When I taught in Darien, the largest class I taught was 22 to 23 students. I have, on average, 10 or 12 kids more per year in Stamford than I ever had in Darien as a teacher."

She wants Kayla in a school where teachers have the luxury of spending more one-on-one time with students, and where more resources are poured into the schools on a per-pupil basis. It's nothing against Stamford, Damiano said repeatedly. It's just that the grass is a little greener across the town line.

It's no secret that the success of schools can vary widely from one ZIP code to another in Fairfield County, as home values and personal wealth ebb and flow throughout the area. But a report issued last week by the Brookings Institution found that the county has the largest discrepancy in the nation. What's more, the report claims that the difference in student achievement from one school to another is tied to more than just socio-economics; it's also a result of uniquely restrictive zoning regulations, according to report author Jonathan Rothwell, a senior research analyst at Brookings.

Zoning

To rank the strictness of zoning regulations across the nation, Rothwell divided the number of zoning and land use attorneys in each market by the total number of law firms to find a saturation level. Fairfield County and the New Haven and Hartford metro areas had the highest saturation with 28 percent of law firms specializing in the field; at the bottom of the list, the market areas in Texas had a 4 percent saturation.

The report found that large metro areas with the least restrictive zoning, like those in Texas, Arkansas, Wisconsin and other states away from the East Coast, had significantly smaller gaps in home values within their markets than those with rigid laws. The Brookings report examined the top 100 metro regions in the United States; the entirety of Fairfield County is included in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metro region.

"It's easier in a sense to be exclusionary in the Northeastern jurisdictions, because they were smaller and carved out explicitly by people who were leaving the central city, and wanted political autonomy. So there's a historical legacy there that separates it in some sense from places out West, like Louisville, where the school system and zoning authorities are much larger in scope," Rothwell said.

While the markets with the most exclusionary zoning had housing cost gaps -- defined by the report as "the average cost of living near schools in the top 20th percentile on test scores divided by the average cost of living near schools in the bottom 20th percentile on test scores" -- of 2.75, those with the least restrictive zoning practices had a gap of 2.39. This means that if a house near a low performing school in a less-restrictive market cost $100,000, a house near a high-performing school would cost $239,000; in a more restrictive area, the costs would leap from $100,000 near a low-performing school to $275,000 near a high-performing school.

It makes sense, said Austin Wolf, a land use and zoning attorney at Cohen & Wolf, a Bridgeport-based law firm, of which he is a co-founder.

"One reason, I guess, is because in towns like Darien, Greenwich, New Canaan and Westport, you have large-lot zoning. They're two- and three- and even as much as five-acre zoning in some towns, which increases the cost of land and also the cost of construction, because you have fewer housing units to absorb the cost of roads, stores and everything else that goes with them," Wolf said Thursday morning.

These restrictions drive home prices upward. But large-lot policies aren't the only zoning practices that can affect home values.

"The smaller towns in Fairfield County are always going to be more difficult to build in, because they're not pro-development," said Wolf, who has been practicing law for more than six decades since graduating from Harvard Law in 1951. Much of that time has centered around land use issues, and he was recently awarded the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award by the Connecticut Bar Association's Planning & Zoning Section.

"You have a more sensitive public also, in places like Westport, Darien, New Canaan and Greenwich. You have a sophisticated and reasonably affluent citizenry who watch everything like a hawk and attend zoning earing almost like recreation," Wolf said. "They turn out for everything, and they're vociferous and usually organized. That makes a difference, and you don't find that as much in the bigger cities."

This active relationship with zoning laws and restrictions contributes to glaring differences from one town to another in Fairfield County. For example, 49.5 percent of fourth-grade students who attended elementary school in Bridgeport's 06604 ZIP code reached the state's goal on the math portion of the 2011 Connecticut Mastery Test. But 92.1 percent of student who attends school in the abutting 06825 ZIP code in Fairfield hit that mark.

Home Values

The gap in home values is greater in Fairfield County than any of the other top-100 markets in the nation, Rothwell found. According to his report, the average annual cost to a renter or homeowner who lives near a school that falls into the top 20 percent when ranked by performance is $35,064 a year; the annual cost for a resident near a school in the bottom 20 percent is $10,026, for a "housing cost gap" of 3.5.

For comparison, Boise City's gap of 1.26 is the smallest gap in the nation; residents near Boise City's top-performing schools pay $11,342 per year for their homes while those near the lowest-performing schools pay $9,016.

"From the perspective of a family that would love to enroll their student in a high-performing school, what is it going to take in terms of housing cost to do that?" Rothwell asked last week. The answer is easy to calculate: About $25,000 more a year. To put that in perspective, that figure is roughly three times the amount of the average tuition bill at a private elementary school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Damiano's plans to educate her daughter in Darien could carry a hefty price. While the average home value in Stamford's 06902 ZIP code, where Cloonan is located, is $538,798, the average cost in Darien's 06820 ZIP code is 38 percent higher at $741,465.

But with that increased home cost comes an increase in test scores. While 81.6 percent of fourth-grade students attending elementary schools in the 06902 ZIP code reached the state target on the 2011 math CMTS, 97.8 percent of Darien students did so.

Peers

It's common knowledge that low-income students often reach that target at a lower rate than their more affluent peers for a variety of reasons. And in towns like Darien, so few students were categorized as "economically disadvantaged" by federal standards that those students' results were not even included in 2011 achievement reports (No Child Left Behind mandates that each school have at least 20 students in a subgroup in order to report the subgroup's performance). Darien isn't the only district for which that data was unavailable; many of the county's smaller and more affluent towns -- New Canaan, New Fairfield, Brookfield, Sherman, Trumbull, Monroe, Newtown, Fairfield, Redding, Ridgefield, Easton, Wilton, Westport and Weston -- did not have enough students who qualified as economically disadvantaged when broken down to the school level.

And schools with lower concentrations of low-income students tend to fare better on standardized tests, while schools with more low-income students are often at the bottom of the performance scale. Luis Munoz Marin elementary school in Bridgeport, where every single child qualified for free- or reduced-price lunch, had the lowest number of fourth-grade students reaching proficiency in both math and reading in 2011. Meanwhile, 100 percent of fourth-grade students at Ridgefield's Farmingville Elementary, New Canaan's West Elementary and Darien's Holmes Elementary reached proficiency last year; not a single fourth-grade student in any of those three schools qualifies for the lunch subsidy.

But a student's ability to achieve can not be predicted solely on his or her economic standing; the economic standing of other students in the classroom can also have a large affect on student test scores, Rothwell said.

"Students seem to do better when they attend high performing, higher scoring schools. Even low-income students who have disadvantaged backgrounds (in high-performing schools) do score higher than low-income students that go to schools that don't have high test scores," he said. "We found that low-income students do better when their non-poor peers score higher."

That was the case in Bethel, where 94.4 percent of the total fourth-grade population reached proficiency in math in 2011, along with 90 percent of low-income students. The district, which has only one elementary school serving fourth-graders, had the largest percentage of low-income fourth-graders meeting the state mark in the district.

Just being granted access to a high-performing school can help raise students' levels of learning, Rothwell argues. And in the end, gaining access to these institutions will affect more than the way students fill in bubble sheets on state tests.

"Test scores are a bureaucratic marker of performance, but the interesting thing is that the access to high quality schools matters not just for test scores, but for wages, for going to college and for the selectivity of those colleges," Rothwell said.

"To me, one of the striking things about this as I was writing it was that we typically think of the divide in education as being between private and public schools, or at least that's how I thought of it. But it turns out that it's extremely expensive to attend a high-scoring public school," he said. "That makes it very difficult for low-income families to move up the economic ladder or for those children to move up the economic ladder when, not only are they faced with the disadvantages that they get at home, but when they enter the public arena through our schools, the disadvantage is being reinforced."